Here, the included artists utilise a primarily monochromatic colour scheme to explore a series of distinct but interconnected thematic approaches. ATOI, the dynamic up-and-coming pairing of Amy Thomas and Oliver Irvine, have a diverse and indefinite practice that incorporates sculpture, found-object, photography, as well as performance-based installation. For ATOI, this work explores a mode of collaboration within sculptural foundations, exploring the relationship between cause and effect, whereby the repercussions of one event are understood as a physical consequence of the previous. Recent developments in their work have lead to an interest in forensic architecture as elastic, constantly responding and acting as witness to its surroundings. Other sculptural and photo-based artefacts characteristic of ATOI's practice often use their own manifesto of involving the cyclical reconditioning of sculpture within live, charged contexts or scenarios. Typically severe, brutal and founded upon ideas of collision and force. The work comments on irreversible change, the reconditioning of the natural environment, and our own instinctual wonderment when confronted with the physical and archaeological sublime.

Simon Belleau's practice, primarily based in photography but also including sculpture and installation, looks at ideas of mortality and the grotesque, but as well comment on architecture, nature, and the monumental versus the monolithic. With Belleau we find a delicate approach to both nature as sublime and horrific, and ideas of mortality as related to the progression of the natural world. Belleau's concerns are about the microcosmic (the cyclical patterns of the day; a human breath), and the macrocosmic (the rotational aspects of the sun; the creation of stalagmites over years) but return to ideas of birth and decay, life and death. A simple darkened photograph of a granite sarcophagus atop a plinth suggests the artist's affinity for those subtly imposing - even sublime - moments that lay just out of reach of our comprehension - the infinitesimal concept of death, perhaps; or a photo of black stalagmites to suggest the incalculability of the earth and - as humans - our own insignificant minutiae.

For Urrutia, working almost exclusively with black in his paintings and charcoal drawings becomes a process of concealment and fragmentation, where appropriated imagery provides the basis for the formation of new interpretations by removing aspects inherent to the past ‘lives’ of his imagery. Yet the imagery retains what makes it recognisable or poignant, and is thus a process of shadows, an addition of black or white layers. In fact, precisely the procedural question - ‘black or white’ - suggests polarised processes: that of either subtraction or addition, and what the artist feels we deserve to be privy to as viewers forms the basis for his practice. Not unlike a photographer or filmmaker, Urrutia is concerned with the concealment and reframing of imagery. Through this destabilisation of our imagery he plays with our collective memory; while Urrutia's images are recognisable, they seem fleeting, as though performing acts like subtle memory triggers or entirely suggestive, calling into question our process of image recognition and personal experience, truth and fiction, reality and fantasy. As a result, the work feels evanescent, fleeting - like some historical trigger that remains just slightly out of grasp, lurking beneath some shadowy cloak left there by the artist to obscure our vision.

Preview Thursday 26th March 2015, 6–9pm
27th March–17th May 2015,
Open Thursday–Sunday 12–6pm
Live Performance by Essex Olivares throughout March, April & May

seasonal closure, Friday 3rd April–Sunday 5th April, 2015

Columbidae takes the forms of labour historically associated with the office as a starting point and includes the work of artists who have traced the various impacts of this work on the body, the mind and the home. At a moment in which workers are increasingly likely to carry their professions on their bodies at all times, the exhibition includes artwork that negotiates the architectures, tools, equipment or language of the office, pointing to moments of aspiration and depression as work continually collapses into life.

The historical starting point for the exhibition is in 1965, when Barbara T. Smith leased a Xerox machine and installed it in her home following the rejection of her print proposal from a prominent lithographers in Los Angeles. Photocopying whatever was available to her in her kitchen cupboards and garden, as well as her own body and children’s toys, Smith created Xerox poetry sets and printed collages that formally experimented with this new technology. Smith’s dual roles as both a Pasadena housewife and an emerging artist in the mid-1960s literally collide in the prints, performing the tensions between public and private space, and paid and unpaid labour.

Dena Yago’s flatbed scanner images, including high resolution capture of lemons, apples or copies of The New York Times, have a clear dialogue with Smith’s Xeroxes in that they also employ the tools and objects readily available to the artist in her working environment. A poem made by the artist on her BlackBerry in the elevator of the legal firm where she worked, also installed in the exhibition, was made as a strategy of blocking awkward elevator conversation, whilst also fitting a writing space into the restrictions of a day job. Formally exploring the phenomenon of the office startup, Essex Olivares’ Office Riddim is a performance installation in an administrative environment that demonstrates the stress and virtuosity of enforced collaboration, flexibility, creativity, and other such corporate directives by employing a choreography in which water coolers and bulldog clips are collaborators. Finally Mélanie Matranga creates seductive sceneographies such as doors that hang from the ceiling out of reach, and unfired clay sculptures that summon the ‘soft’ environments and ‘friendly’ tools epitomizing the realities of homeworking conditions for freelancers today. Her subjects are seen stressed out on sofas, covered in wires, chain-smoking, drinking, exhausted.

Following her inclusion in the group exhibition Barbara T. Smith’s full Poetry Set will be shown in the gallery from 28th May – 5th July 2015

Notes:

Columbidae is the name for the bird family that includes doves and pigeons.

Laura McLean-Ferris wishes to acknowledge a number of artists, curators and writers whose conversations were instrumental to developing this exhibition, in particular Tyler Coburn, Josh Kline, Nicola Lees and Cally Spooner.

The Cipher and the Frame started with Peter Greenaway and his 1989 allegorical drama, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover. Through a tightly structured composition, the film stages a series of archetypes in relation to five sets. This exhibition is a homage of sorts, but it is also about a method: a timed exhibition following a score, with overlays, silences and loops, programmed on and played off a Dave Jones sync unit.

The origin of the word cipher is ‘zero’, a void, null. In The Cipher and the Frame there is a return to the aesthetic and political stakes of the removed autonomy: the body double, the persona, the stand in. The exhibition focuses on an approach to representation in which the character is secondary to the framing devices that propel the action forward; devices ranging from the stage and the prop, to the social milieu in which the action is set.

Anna Uddenberg’s sculptural installation It (2011) sets the backdrop for The Cipher and the Frame and draws on her ongoing fascination with the dismembered and deconstructed persona. Tim Etchells’ new commission Spoken Out is an integral part of the exhibition’s score of moving image and
sound. This audio work is presented in two chapters in which a single voice occupies a set of six speakers. The voice is both disembodied – seemingly
perplexed by its lack of human place – and, at the same time, firmly located in the materiality of speakers and wires which substantially create, make place for, and frame the work. Etchells’ repeated, re-spoken and remade phrases become strangely concrete language-objects, summoning fictitious presence in its simple procedure of repeating and remixing. Spoken Out punctuates a score of moving image work by Juliette Blightman, Mike Kelley, Malcolm Le Grice, Stuart Marshall, Eléonore Saintagnan and Leslie Thornton.

Taking place during the opening of The Cipher and the Frame is Beth Collar’s durational performance and live video feed, The Hand of Glory, a work that will remain in the space for the duration of the show.

Graffiti Life Gallery are proud to present a solo show by Mr Penfold. A street art favourite, Mr Penfold will this time be working to a smaller scale. The show will feature twenty small paintings on paper, based around his theme of cigarettes and matchstick studies.

Over the past few years Mr Penfold has gradually stripped back his work, focusing on the contrast between colour, texture and line work, drawing inspiration from classic abstraction and minimalism. Mr Penfold explores his love for iconic pop culture and clean crisp graphic painting.

Tabs, Butts and Dog Ends, a free exhibition runs until 3rd May 2015 at The Graffiti Life Gallery, 26 Cheshire Street.

Opening night is Thursday 2nd April at 6:30pm and as ever, everyone is welcome. You can sign up to our mailing list to receive a preview of the work and find out more details of the show opening.

Twenty fives years ago, Capitalism basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War. However, in 2008 we all watched in amazement as the edifice of our unassailable wealth and prosperity virtually disappeared overnight.

Since these events the artist Gordon Shrigley has been patiently searching for radical new forms of popular ideology to make sense of the present malaise, which are not based on what he sees as either outmoded 19th century political ideas or laissez-faire forms of postmodern aporia. Failing to discover anything new, Shrigley published Without Residue, A Preliminary Introduction to a Manifesto for An Unidentified Political Object (2010). His manifesto is a clarion call for all citizens to embrace the limitless space of the imagination as a path to discovering “… a mode of space-less thinking, an oxymoronic territory of a-temporality, without horizon, that proceeds without the need to affirm on the basis of that which bounds. Simply a fugitive kind of abandon.”

It is our pleasure to announce that for the 2015 General Election, Shrigley is to stand as a prospective member of Parliament, under the banner of Campaign. The questions outlined in Without Residue are to be played out through the form of a political physical theatre of everyday life that seeks to appropriate the electoral process as a frame for exposition.

Campaign Slogans:

I’m from your imagination, and I’m here to help.
Real politics are the possession and distribution of possibilities.
If it is true that the space of the imagination is so precious – why do we ration it?
A revolution need not be an act of violence or an insurrection, but simply a Line of thought.
I have nothing to offer, but offer itself.
I’ve seen the future, and it doesn’t exist.

Gordon Shrigley (b.1964, Wiltshire, UK) studied at Bournville College of Art, Birmingham; the University of Westminster and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has exhibited in the UK and abroad including Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin; the Centre for Contemporary Art, Sacramento; the Musée dʼart Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. He was selected for an artist’s residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 1998 and at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath in 2000. His work can be found in the Staatsgalerie Drawing and Print Collection, Stuttgart; Academy Schloss Solitude Archive Collection, Stuttgart; Musée dʼart Moderne, Saint-Etienne and the Ludwigsburg State Archives, Germany.

From 11 March 2015 artists Lucy Clout and Marianna Simnett, winners of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2015, will premiere new moving-image works in an exhibition at Jerwood Space. These new works, suggested by the project title ‘What Will They See of Me?', have been developed following the award of £20,000 commissions to each artist at the close of the first stage of the Awards in April 2014. Following its debut in London, the show will tour to CCA, Glasgow from 30 May until 12 July 2015.

Over the last year Lucy and Marianna have expanded the initial pilot ideas they presented in stage one of the Awards into even more accomplished moving-image works. Together, these projects further explore the uncertainties and ambiguities of identity in response to the curatorial brief, 'What Will They See of Me?'. Both artists consider how images of the self are rehearsed and relayed for others, and how the faces people project to the world are complex and many-sided. In their different ways, they both ask what shapes and constitutes a subject. Identity, like destiny, is supposedly in the blood, but is also, and increasingly, in our own hands.

- Featuring interviews with news journalists, bloggers and feature writers, Lucy Clout's video 'From Our Own Correspondent’ interrogates the mechanics of the interview process itself, with a focus on the degree of preparation and self-assertion each interviewer regards as necessary to their job. Set within an aggregate of hotel rooms and corridors - transposable private and professional settings - these descriptions begin to expose the basic power dynamics played out in other spoken relationships, conversations and encounters.

- Continuing the fascination with the rites of passage of early adolescence that distinguished her previous film ‘The Udder', Marianna Simnett shifts her compass from rural England to the majestic mountain landscapes of Albania. Here her young heroine Isabel is shadowed (or watched over dutifully) by Lali, a middle-aged 'sworn virgin’ whose refusal to be identified as female casts doubt over Isabel's perceptions and bodily intimations of womanhood. Stark and haunting, Simnett's film, called simply 'Blood', has the strange, unsettling familiarity of a fairy tale.

Matt’s Gallery and Dilston Grove present the second in a new series of co-productions Cantata Profana by Matt Stokes.

The exhibition runs parallel with a new commission of work at Matt’s Gallery, Madman in a Lifeboat (1 April–24 May 2015). The presentation of both works across east and south London this spring marks the culmination of Stokes’ year-long Bartlett fellowship.

Cantata Profana is a six screen video and sound installation focusing on the physicality of extreme metal vocalists and the ability of their voices to immerse a listener and transcend both the individual performer and group.

Cantata Profana takes the form of an amphitheatre of video projections pre- senting a new musical composition, created in partnership with British com- poser Orlando Gough, artist and musician Tim Kerr and six grindcore vocalists. Cantata Profana interweaves extreme metal music culture with clas- sical choral traditions, to create an unexpected union. The intense sounds and body movements of the vocalists, together with the backdrop of the out- dated German Democratic Republic radio studio in which the piece was ﬁlmed, all contribute to the atmosphere of this unique and enveloping work.

Stokes’ practice has developed from a long-standing enquiry into events and beliefs that shape people’s lives and identities. Music – its history, sub- cultures and socio-political eﬀects often provides the catalyst for researching and forming collaborative relationships with musicians, writers, actors, com- posers and communities, bringing together their interests, knowledge and skills in potentially conﬂicting situations. By exploring the resulting ex- changes of ideas, the ﬁnal outcomes challenge our assumptions and under- standing about speciﬁc scenes or chosen ways of living.

Matt Stokes (b.1973, Penzance, Cornwall) and has lived, studied and worked in the north east of England since 1993. In 2006, he was the winner of the Beck’s Futures Prize, and in 2012 was shortlisted for the Jarman Award. Recent solo exhibitions include In Absence of the Smoky God, Site Gallery, & Sensoria, Sheﬃeld 2014; Dance Swine Dance, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool 2014; Give to Me the Life I Love, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne & The Whitechapel Gallery, London 2013; Nuestro tiempo/Our Time, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville, Spain, 2011; Cantata Profana, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011; The Distant Sound, De Hallen, Haarlem, Netherlands, 2011 and No Place Else Better Than Here, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany in 2010.

The piece was originally commissioned by Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Germany, produced by Forma Arts with support from De Hallen Haarlem, Netherlands and Arts Council England. It has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; De Hallen Haarlem and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Matt Stokes is the first Bartlett Fellow, a new residency-based fellowship established by Fine Art at The University of Newcastle in partnership with Matt’s Gallery.
Dilston Grove is at the south west corner of Southwark Park, London SE16 2UA:
• Phone: 020 7237 1230
• Tube: Canada Water (Jubilee and Overground lines)
• Rail: South Bermondsey and Surrey Quays.
• Buses: 1, 47, 188, 199, 225, 281, C10, P12
• For a map and directions click here.

Matt Stokes, Cantata Profana, Matt’s Gallery at Dilston Grove is supported by Arts Council England, CGP London and Southwark Council.

Maureen Paley is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Maaike Schoorel.

Maaike Schoorel’s work is informed by her research into the human mind’s ability to perceive and understand the visual world. The subjects of her paintings appear at once recognisable and elusive. Using photographic source material of people, places and objects Schoorel’s compositions simultaneously appear and dissolve into the canvas.

The perceptual systems of the brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying. Human and animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps, mapping some aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface. These different modules are interconnected and influence each other.

The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, termed the distal stimulus or distal object. By means of light, sound or another physical process, the object stimulates the body's sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction. This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus. These neural signals are transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the percept. Perception is sometimes described as the process of constructing mental representations of distal stimuli using the information available in proximal stimuli.

Psychologist Jerome Bruner has developed a model of perception. According to him people go through the following process to form opinions:
- When we encounter an unfamiliar target we are open to different informational cues and want to learn more about the target.
- In the second step we try to collect more information about the target. Gradually, we encounter some familiar cues, which help us categorise the target.
- At this stage, the cues become less open and selective. We try to search for more cues that confirm the categorisation of the target. We also actively ignore and even distort cues that violate our initial perceptions. Our perception becomes more selective and we finally paint a consistent picture of the target.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception

Born 1973, Santpoort, The Netherlands. Maaike Schoorel has recently returned from New York to the Netherlands and now lives and works in Amsterdam. Residencies include: The American Academy in Rome, 2015 (forthcoming) and the International Studio and Curatorial Programme, New York, 2013.

Employing found moving image material, Sutcliffe’s work explores our cultural history. His irreverent approach incorporates simple animation, appropriated television channel idents, interviews and intermissions to explore issues of appropriation and notions of class, identity and the creative process. In the past, he has borrowed formal strategies of arrangement from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Nabokov, amongst others. More recently, the work of the writer Walter Abish has been a source of inspiration.

The title of this exhibition is taken from Henry Green’s phrase for evening visits to a pub in Montpelier Square, where he would listen to casual conversation as research for his books. Latterly, Green’s deafness meant that conversations were often misheard. Similarly, Sutcliffe’s video works consciously engage with the half-heard, half-understood and half-remembered. In ‘The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry’ (1973), Harold Bloom describes influence in poetry as being akin to an influenza that writers have to learn to protect themselves from by willfully misreading their predecessors. He refers to this as misprision. Sutcliffe refers instead to his related process as ‘squinting’.

Stephen Sutcliffe was born in Harrogate in 1968. He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and Glasgow School of Art (from where he participated on an exchange programme at Cal Arts, Valencia California). Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Tramway, Glasgow; Stills, Edinburgh; the Whitechapel Gallery’s Zilkha auditorium, London; Cubitt, London; Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin; Tate Britain, Art Now / Lightbox and at the ICA, London, as part of ‘Nought to Sixty’. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and film festivals at venues including Tate Britain, London; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Frieze Projects, London; Dundee Contemporary Arts; Studio Voltaire, London; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; the Zenomap Performance Space at the Venice Biennale and in the British Council touring exhibition ‘Electric Earth.’ He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2009 and again in 2014 and has been commissioned to create short films both for Channel 4 and the BBC.

For further information about and images of this exhibition please contact mail@robtufnell.com